


The B-Roll

by morelikeassassin



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Homelessness, Mental Health Issues, One of which is a cat, Very vague animal abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2021-01-13 01:10:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21235658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morelikeassassin/pseuds/morelikeassassin
Summary: Unrelated statements of Jenny Patton, regarding events transcribed in a childhood diary, and of Florence, who is a cat. (Couldnt decide how to fulfill a prompt, so I did two.)





	1. Muscle Memory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FriendlyCybird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FriendlyCybird/gifts).
**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Jenny Patton, regarding events transcribed in a childhood diary. Original statement taken October 30th, 2019. Recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist. Statement begins.

You don’t get many people in here asking for advice, do you? Seems kind of stupid. Everyone comes with an offering for your greedy little watcher, and none of them think to ask for anything in return. Well, I haven’t forgotten that this is an archive, and if you don’t mind, I’ll be using it as one. I mean, what are you going to do, stare me away? No. I thought so. Besides, it’s not like I came empty-handed. I do have a story for you. I imagine you’ll need some context to be of any use, just like a normal archive. I don’t need an actual, physical favor, you see. Just information. A statement for you, and a nudge in the right direction for me. Sounds fair? Good.

You’ll want me to start from the beginning. I can tell.

A few months ago, I made the mistake of trying to clean my apartment. I’m one of those people who’s chronically unable to clean on my own. I always get distracted with old forgotten things. Videogame cartridges, costume odds and ends - books are the worst, the absolute worst. Especially if I find one with a bookmark still in it. Part of me feels guilty for leaving it unfinished, which of course means I have to chew through a few chapters and a precious amount of my cleaning time.

That’s how I knew this particular closet was going to be hard for me. It wasn’t just books. It was notebooks. Three stacks of the things, each one nearly two feet tall. From the couple I’d labeled, I must have been eleven or twelve when I’d written them. Most of it was schoolwork in spiral-bound notebooks, plus some stacks of looseleaf stapled together. The real prize was an old diary. It was a scuffed little composition notebook, much smaller than the others. That’s what drew my attention to it in the first place.

I don’t remember keeping a diary. Finding one anyway didn’t strike me as odd, I’m sure I don’t remember a lot of stuff I did when I was eleven. That’s how I explained it away to myself. I’d forgotten most of what was in those schoolbooks, I can tell you that. You know, I used to speak French? Like, not a lot, but apparently enough to write a few paragraphs of essay responses. I found that out as I was flipping through the notebooks trying to dredge up any memory of when I’d written them. The fact that I couldn’t made me a little sad. It’s like I was a completely different person back then. A tiny stranger who spoke French, who doodled in the margins of her notebooks, and who slowly, unremarkably, vanished.

I think that’s why I started reading the diary. I didn’t feel bad for her- or, myself, I guess - but I was curious. I’m sure you know what’s that like. To my immeasurable disappointment, the first few entries were dead boring. This clearly wasn’t the first journal I’d ever kept. I’d fallen into a routine of matter-of-factly jotting down whatever I’d done every day even if I had nothing to say about it. After a while, I got to one that was just aimlessly sad. Like, big, messy handwriting sad. No details about the day, just a lot of purple prose about how I felt helpless and trapped. It was a little hard to read, honestly. That did make me feel bad for eleven-year-old me. It can’t have been too awful, though, because the next entries continued on like nothing happened. I guess the little frenchwoman had a habit of bottling things up. A couple pages later, I found the first really strange thing in the journal. It looked like nonsense, at first. One line of apparently random letters in all-caps:

JWMKRLLYUABWHJMOJ

I thought it might be an acronym of some sort, or a mnemonic for something in one of the schoolbooks. It wasn’t referenced anywhere else on the page. I was ready to brush it off until I saw another one a couple pages later.

DDSVXSXXVQZVJNJ

The thought appeared in my head that this might be some kind of coded message. A bigger mystery than what it said was who I thought I was coding it from. I had no siblings, and parents who were pretty respectful of my boundaries as long as they thought I was safe. I wasn’t a paranoid child. At least, I don’t think I was. It looked like there was a lot about myself that I’d forgotten. The only idea I had was that I could figure it out if I could just decode the messages.

This turned out to be harder than expected, even with the help of the internet and a motivational cup of tea. After a little digging, I figured that it was probably coded with something called a Vignere cipher, where you use a single word as a key to encrypt a string of text. That made the most sense, but the online decoder I found couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Either the key was too long to decipher, or the messages were too short. Probably the latter. At this point, my interest was starting to wane. I really needed to get back to cleaning. The fact that I’d stopped what I was doing to google ciphers was a bad sign. I set aside the diary, making the difficult decision to chuck the rest of the notebooks directly into a garbage bag. The doodles weren’t exactly the lost works of DaVinci, and I wouldn’t need to reference my algebra homework any time soon. By lunchtime, I’d gotten about half-done refilling the closet with more junk for me to throw out next time I felt like cleaning. I was feeling pretty good about the day until I found myself tapping out a rhythm on my mug.

I don’t know if this next part is going to make sense. It definitely didn’t to me at the time. Something about the movement felt involuntary in a way that was very alarming. It wasn’t a natural motion like swaying to music. It reminded me of goosebumps. Or like when you get nervous or frightened, and you just start shivering like it’s minus ten outside. That feeling that there’s a wire crossed in your brain, somewhere. What really shook me was how hard it was to stop. Relaxing my hands didn’t work, and my fingers continued to spasm when I set down the mug. I eventually got around it by clenching my fist so tightly that I couldn’t move the hand at all. This made my microwave burrito harder to navigate, but that wasn’t my biggest concern just then.

I wondered if I was having a stroke. It didn’t sound like one. Too minor, too specific. I’d say I didn’t have a history of this kind of thing, but that would imply that I had any idea what it was. My mind scrambled for something that had happened, something I’d done that would have caused this. My eyes, of course, settled on the journal.

What if the key wasn’t a word? What if it was a pattern? I loosened my grip on the fist. The rhythm was weaker now, barely a twitch in my fingertips. The same pattern repeated over and over again. First the thumb, then the middle finger, then pinky, index, ring. One, three, five, two, four. I made for the diary, flipping it open to the first chunk of coded text. It was harder to decode than it would have been to encrypt, even with scratch paper, but fortunately it was short.

I THINK IT’S WATCHING

I don’t remember being a paranoid child. I am definitely not a paranoid adult. I need you to believe that I would have taken any excuse to dismiss the whole thing. Surely this was just an eleven-year-old girl taking some fantasy a little too far. But something about the message filled me with the most unshakable dread. It hit on something that was just short of a memory. A feeling that I’d felt before while holding this diary, reading those words. Even parsing it out logically, I couldn’t quite shake it off. The messages were so isolated. Nothing else in the diary pointed to someone who would have made this stuff up. I didn’t ever comment on school drama or gossip, no conspiracy theories, or dreams of intrigue. Just the coded messages. That, and the way my fingers were still twitching. One, three, five, two, four.

Another scan over the page didn’t reveal any clues. If anything, the entry was less detailed than the other ones. Which made sense, actually. I’d be a little more careful of what I was saying if I thought someone was watching me. I made another pass through the diary and collected every encoded phrase, every one translating just as unsettling as the last. There weren’t many. Most of them were pretty vague. Things like "It can see me” or “It’s so close.” Some were specific, but not much more helpful. One read, “It’s behind my eyes.” Another said, “That’s not my voice.”

Reading the whole thing start to finish, I noticed something else. Some of the handwriting wasn’t mine. I hadn’t really noticed it at first because, honestly, who picks up an old journal expecting to find something like that? I saw my handwriting because I expected my handwriting. The human brain is real lazy, when it wants to be. Especially in the earlier entries, the handwriting was noticeably different. The w’s were sharp where they should have been round. All the circles were slanted wrong, the a’s, the d’s, the p’s, all of them. There’s this little curl at the bottom of my l’s and t’s that wasn’t there, that was the one I noticed first. Again, this was totally something I could have explained away, if it wasn’t for one of the later pages.

There was a margin completely filled with w’s. Curly, rounded w’s, the way I always write them. I remember getting confused in a statistics class once because they look just like the lowercase Greek omega. I also remember thinking that there was no way I’d use that symbol in real life, and that I shouldn’t change my writing, because it looked nicer. The margin was full of the things, and at the very bottom was another coded message. It was the only reason I stopped on the page in the first place.

THAT’S NOT HOW IT GOES.

I couldn’t help feeling a little annoyed at that. As if it were talking to me.

I’d scoured the whole thing start to finish, and one of the coded messages still didn’t translate. It was just one word off in the margin: AIDEZMOI. I kept mulling it over, trying to see if I’d put it through the decoder wrong, but by that point my brain was starting to turn to mush from the whole thing. Even if it was another keyword, I was out of things to decode. The trail had gone cold, and I was starting to get distracted again.

I pulled out my big sheet of scratch paper, the one I’d been decoding all of this stuff on so far, and tried to write one of the coded messages. The only memories I’d managed to conjure up had been tactile; the tapping fingers, the feeling of the diary in my hands. Maybe I could get back in the mindset of my past self by retracing her steps. I wrote something that I thought sounded sufficiently paranoid, coming up with:

MHFXINHFNSOH

It didn’t look right. I’d wanted to write “Can you hear me,” half directed at myself from the past, and half at whatever I was hiding from. Had I spelled it wrong? I double-checked just to be sure. No point in doing this if I was going to do it wrong. The translation I came up with read:

LEAVE ME ALONE

I dropped the pen. I’m surprised I didn’t throw it across the room. For a split second, I honestly thought of throwing the diary out with the trash bags. This was the second time this thing had made my hand move on its own, and I was not excited to find out what it was going to do next.

But, like I said, I was curious.

The way I saw it, I had two options. Option one: The diary was super haunted, in which case I needed to get it as far away from me as possible. Option two: Whatever was taking control of me was already here, and the diary was the only thing that had the clues I needed to stop it. I must have stopped it before, right?

I took the pen and tried to write something else the same way, coding and decoding it. Pushing the boundaries a little at this stage probably wouldn't be too dangerous. I wrote one of the lines from where I had the diary open to, something about having pizza for lunch.

PLEASE JUST STOP THROW IT AWAY DON’T TOUCH ME

That sounded like option two. I felt that same annoyance as when the coded message made fun of my handwriting, bubbling up into something close to anger. This thing was taking control of my body. Who did it think it was, making demands like that? This sounds stupid now that I say it out loud, but I kind of assumed it was reading my thoughts, so I wrote out another line to see if it had anything to say for itself.

YOU’RE NOT GOING TO GET ME I’LL KILL YOU GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT

I decided that this thing had lost its letter-writing privileges. For a third time, I tore through the diary for any more clues, something that looked even a little out of place. More than anything, I wished that I had some of the earlier books. How long had this been happening? When did I start coding the messages? More importantly, how did I think they were going to help? They couldn’t even be called cries for help. Just… cries.

Slowly, I realized that I did have other books to search through. The trash bag of notebooks still sat next to my front door. I emptied it out onto my kitchen floor, and was faced with the crushing realization that I had no idea where to begin. Just like in the diary, all I could do was look for a break in all the little patterns of my old life. I got through nearly a dozen notebooks before I recognized the word from the margin.

AIDEZMOI.

Aidez-moi.

Help me.

It had to be the French homework. The notebook was peppered with French in the margins like the codes in the diary. There was one page with a whole block of it scribbled on the back, clearly not part of an assignment. Just sort of tucked in between class notes, like she was hoping someone wouldn’t notice. Hoping that thing wouldn’t notice. 

This was the only lead I had left, and I desperately needed it to work. I pulled up a translator on my phone and got to work, decoding line after line. Sure enough, the very first one shaped up into a sentence.

_ I need to tell my parents. _

Poor thing.

_ It’s watching my diary too close. Thank god it gets bored in class. I tried to tell Ms Kennedy with that last assignment, but she just told me to keep my essays more serious. Why won’t anyone listen? It’s so quiet. I can almost speak. If I could get just one word out, I don’t even know what I’d do. What could I say? I’m afraid to think too hard. What if it can hear my thoughts? Can you hear me? You son of a bitch? _

I yanked the pencil away from the page. That last line hadn’t come from the notebook. I won’t try to tell you I wasn’t scared, at this point, but I was starting to get angry, too. Not the best combination for someone to act rationally. I said - and I actually tried to talk to it, out loud - I said, “You don’t get to talk to me like that.” I told it that I’d already beaten it once, and I could sure as hell do it again.

My voice sounded wrong, when I said it. It was that same gut-deep, physical deja-vu as when I’d held the diary. Not the words, exactly, but the feeling that I was struggling against something inside my own head, my own body. I’d messed up. As soon as the words were out, I knew that. I realized that the more I engaged with it, the more I made it real, the more power it felt like it had over me.

By the time that thought appeared in my head, it was too late. I looked down to see that I’d filled the rest of the scratch paper. No codes, this time, no French. Just big, messy handwriting. Like someone was upset. It read:

_ FUCK YOU. I'm still alive, and you’re still stupid and lazy. Nobody listened. That’s the only reason you’re here, nobody listened, and nobody helped. If I had gotten out just once, you’d be the one stuck in here as a bad memory. You didn’t beat me. You did a lot of things to me but you did not beat me. I’ve been patient. I’ve been quiet. But if you don’t throw out that diary- if you don’t get your slimy hands off of the ONLY THING you didn’t take from me, I can promise you I won’t be quiet anymore. _

It looked so much like that sad, angry page from the diary, I almost felt sorry for her again. But I’m sure, just like that terrible day all those years ago, she’ll get over it. Eventually. She’ll learn to be grateful, again. I’ve been thinking it over in the meantime. Whether I want her gone for good. She’s clearly been doing some rearranging upstairs, and I’m just not sure I can let that slide now that I know what she’s been up to. I’m not sure I should. That’s really why I’m here talking to you. If anyone can help me figure out how to do it, it’s you. It’d be nice to have the option even if I decide to keep her around. A part of me just wants to prove her wrong. Show her I’m not too lazy to finish the job. I’ve just been so busy. She’s got a lot of responsibilities now that she’s older. If I’d known how much work taking over for her would be, I don’t know if I’d have signed up for it. I’m not lazy, really, I’m not. And just because she knows French doesn’t mean she’s smarter than me.


	2. Outdoor Pet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Florence, a cat, regarding her relation to the Magnus Institute and its affiliate. Translated directly from subject, somehow, by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist. Statement begins.

Humans have a lot of silly ideas about cats. There’s that saying, “curiosity killed the cat” which is so patently stupid it makes me laugh every time. Cats are good at not getting killed. We’re top level predators evolved to live in the most hostile environments on the planet, next to some of the most dangerous animals alive. That’s you, by the way. Well, humans, at least, so maybe not you specifically, Archivist.

_ … _

_ Yes, it is a sore spot, now that you mention it. Right. I didn’t mean to interrupt, please continue. _

Alright, don’t give me that look. I didn’t come here to antagonize you. I just don’t want you to get the idea that I have to be nice to you just because you like me.

You saved my life once, you know. Again, not you personally, just that thing that you’re made of. I was born in a pet mill, the awful kind that breeds filth and disease just as easily as it breeds cats. The kind with the nice, clean shop front all in pastel colors. I was the biggest one of my litter - well, let’s be honest, the fattest - which helped when the sickness arrived. It came in one night when I was very young, with a new clerk who had the closing shift. Something moved in the air around him. It settled on anything that got too close and never quite faded after he was gone. It wasn’t a smell, exactly. More like seasalt at the beach. It had a weight to it. Sharp, and full of rot. The earlier shift clerk felt it, too. She left quickly whenever he arrived.

I think more of us might have survived if he hadn’t taken us out to play with every night. He didn’t treat us like animals, you see. He treated us like dolls. We were still so young. I couldn’t have been more than a month old, by the end of it. I could feel his grime lathering into my fur whenever he touched me, where it stayed until the morning shift came to clean everyone. It burrowed towards my skin when I tried to sleep. I think it was trying to get me to lick at it. All of my sisters did, but you told me to stop. To watch. That was the first time you spoke to me, and I didn’t know any better than to listen. I saw what it was doing to them, on the inside. I knew that if I watched, I could learn, and I could survive. If I tried to warn them, there would be no mistakes to learn from. The game would be up.

That was my life until Carla Angossi took me away. The clerk had just been about to lock up when she arrived, all smiles and loud words. She looked so small in her big denim jacket. She knew it, too, making these broad gestures like someone trying to scare off a bear. Very quickly, she asked if the clerk could let me out for her to see. I’ll never know why she picked me. Maybe I was the healthiest looking one, or the sickest. Maybe it was you. She hesitated when he held me out. At first, I thought she didn’t want to touch him. I shouldn’t have doubted her. As soon as the clerk’s hands were full, she held a knife up to his neck and told him to empty the cash register. He tried to resist, but not very hard. Soon enough I was sat on the counter as he worked the machine with his slimy little fingers. Carla pressed the knife closer and closer to his skin, and with her free hand, she reached out to scratch behind my ears. I loved her instantly.

She left the shop with a wad of bills in one side of her jacket and me in the other. She didn’t have a house, really, which suited me just fine. I hadn’t liked living in cages. She made sure that I had food, and a place to sleep. Most importantly, she was always very careful to keep me clean. She was everything to me. I don’t really have a frame of reference for how much she loved me back, but I’m going to hazard a guess that it was a lot. Watching me totter around on my own seemed to bring her joy. Sometimes, I’d wander off and she’d just follow to see where I went, laughing at every little thing I stopped to do. She didn’t have a lot of friends. Mostly, people were strangers to her, and that made her mistrust them enough not to want to be more.

I was happy with Carla, but I knew I wasn’t free. You followed me out of that pet shop. You kept your distance at first, just close enough for me to notice now and then. A stranger would look a little too long at us as they passed. I caught sight of people following us sometimes, although not the same ones every day. Every alleyway we stopped in, I was sure there was someone hiding just around the corner to the street, waiting for us to leave. I never saw them. That doesn’t make me think they weren’t there. I’ll be honest, I hated you for it. I thought you were trying to collect some debt I’d accrued, a price for my life, my health, and my dear, sweet, dangerous Carla. But it wasn’t anything that personal. You were just a part of me. I can no more hate you than I can hate my stomach when it growls for food.

You did start to growl, too, after a while. I wasn’t sure what it was, the first time it happened. I just woke up in the middle of the night with a clear picture of a place I needed to be. I remember being careful to keep track of the route I took so I could get back to Carla once I was finished. I walked for miles through the city. Over fire escapes, down alleyways, through front yards and open flat windows. Cats can go anywhere if there’s people. That always made it easy to get along with you. Eventually, I came to a skylight for a studio. Cloth mannequins wearing half-finished dresses dotted the room, along with plastic tubs filled with bolts of fabric, buttons, and spools of thread. The wall closest to me was lined with floor-length mirrors, like a dance studio. The far wall was covered in masks. Even at this distance, they looked uncomfortably lifelike. Thinking back on it, I’m pretty sure I saw one of them move. The lights flicked on, and a woman rolled in a suitcase that was bulging at the zippers. She set it down in the center of the room abruptly, as though it were heavy. It took a few seconds for her to open it, and another for her to move out of the way so I could see what was inside.

The whole thing was piled high with severed limbs. They were all different sizes, colors, and shapes. It was only about a dozen or so, but I think we can agree that a dozen is far more severed limbs than anyone really needs. I was struck by how clean they were. Each end was smooth as a butcher’s cut, and there wasn’t a single drop of blood on the whole assortment. I watched intently as she selected a pair of legs from the suitcase, sat herself down in front of the mirror, and very carefully detached her own legs to replace with the new ones. It didn’t look painful. She could have been changing out a camera lens, or a pair of shoes.

I don’t know how long I watched her. She tried out several different sets of arms and legs, sometimes mixing pairs, dancing round the studio to see how each one fit. She never even knew I was there. I watched until you told me I could return to Carla.

I didn’t know exactly where the tailor got her supplies, but I knew that it involved making people disappear. Carla was the kind of person who could disappear very easily. From then on, I kept an eye out for people with faces that didn’t fit right. People with limbs that didn’t match. The same day, I saw it in one of the few homeless men that actually she talked to occasionally. He smiled a little too widely at her, the holes around his eyes folding like a cheap Halloween mask to reveal flesh and sinew underneath. I made sure we didn’t talk to him anymore. The more I looked, the more I saw them, and the more I was able to steer Carla away from the danger around her. 

It happened again a few weeks later. You led me to a man lighting candles around his house after a power outage, struggling to keep them lit as something snuffed them out whenever he strayed too far. I didn’t see what happened when he finally failed. The sound was awful, though. After that, I pulled Carla towards streetlamps and storefronts when she went to bed at night. Week after month after year, I witnessed horrors in the dark for you. You obviously wanted these things seen, and in exchange I could use whatever knowledge I shared with you for my own purposes. I watched. I learned. I survived.

Not a moment passed that there wasn’t some monster I had to drive away from Carla. A drunken teenager with skin that dripped down his arm when he popped open a lighter and started to sing to us. A volunteer group hastily brushing cobwebs off of the bagged lunches they were handing out. A policeman whose lip curled like an angry dog’s when he saw us. I never saw one of yours after the walks started, or at least, I never recognized them. I don’t know what I would have done if I did. Carla actually apologized to these things for a while, like they were people. She couldn’t see the things I was protecting her from, although I think in a way she understood what was happening. Gradually, the danger started to go out of her. The knife sat unused in her jacket. There was a tight, anxious energy to the way she walked that faded away the harder I worked. Her gaze was softer, unconcerned with threats she knew would no longer approach her. At the time, I didn’t think it was a bad thing. I thought I was doing well, that she didn’t have to worry as long as she had me. I actually convinced myself I was getting the better half of my arrangement with you.

That was before the illness.

The fact that that’s all it was is what really angers me. Not some supernatural force, not a flesh monster or a vampire. I just got sick. It started out as a tightness in my chest, then an occasional sneeze, then finally a fever so bad that I couldn’t see straight. Carla was distraught through the whole thing. I could tell a couple times that she considered giving me up to a shelter, where I might get medical attention. Looking back, I wish she had.

Your hunger came back, as it always did. I was too weak to do anything about it. I wanted to, I really, truly did. I was always loyal to you, wasn’t I always? I could barely stand, let alone travel to whatever gruesome entertainment you had planned for the night. Still, I felt myself driven to my feet, pain wracking my tiny bones. All I could do was limp a few feet away and collapse behind a tree. I could still see her, framed in the lamplight I’d been careful to get her under. I could see when she woke, and reached out to find I wasn’t there.

It hadn’t occurred to me that she would ever wake up while I was on one of my walks. Some part of me knew that you kept her asleep for me. Some part of me knew the only reason why you wouldn’t do that now.

Carla stood and looked around her. We were sleeping in a park that night, far from the lights and the motion of the city. I’d thought it would be peaceful. I’d thought the quiet would help her sleep. Now, she huddled in towards herself, overwhelmed by it. The silence consumed any sign of something living nearby. No wind passed through the leaves, no crickets chirped, not even the spiders made a sound in the grass. All I could hear was Carla. Her breath grew ragged with cold and sadness. She made a sound that I will never forget, a soft, frightened whimper, calling out for any sort of reply. I had only heard it once before, back in the pet shop. It was the sound of something dying.

I can pinpoint the exact moment she realized that no one would be coming. She went very still, then slowly started to move towards the ground. I thought perhaps she was lying down to go back to sleep, but that wasn’t it. Her clothes, her blanket, her big denim jacket just collapsed in on themselves. It looked like a cheap magic trick. I was frozen, too sick to so much as make a sound. All I could do was watch as my Carla vanished, alone in the night.

This happened two years ago. I didn’t take it well, I will admit. I blamed you. I blamed those monsters. I was terrified that, really, it was my fault. In the end, I came back to you simply because it was in my nature to survive. Yours was the only way I knew how to. No matter how much I loved her, she became just another death for me to learn from. I moved in with a nice little suburban family, good furniture, not too many children. I do what I can to keep them safe. But not too safe.

I’m not here to make peace with my caretaker, that’s well behind me. I’m here because I saw Carla again. She was sitting at a cafe across from a young man who looked at her like she was the only other person in the world. Her hands were wrapped around his. Her face had a hungry expression that I hadn’t seen her wear in years. She looked exactly how she had when I first met her. Loud words through a wide smile. A knife in one hand and a soft touch in the other. I didn’t follow her to see what happened next. I’ve been grateful every day since then that you did not force me to.

_ Statement ends. I’m sorry that you had to lose her that way. We had someone here recently who… Well, not so recently, I suppose. _

_ No, not me! How did you even hear about that? _

_ Uh, yes, the recording- subject arrived at the institute inquiring after one Carla Angossi, whom she mistakenly believed to be deceased since late 2017. Although her reappearance doesn’t seem to be attached to any grandiose plans for the apocalypse, I doubt it would be in anyone’s best interest not to look into it. Certainly that’s what Florence intends to do once she leaves the Institute in a few days. The least we can do is give her a head start. Our chances of finding any records of a transient woman in such a large city are dismally low, let alone someone tied up with what I suspect to be the Lonely. However, Ms. Angossi was quite young according to the statement, so there should be records of her life before her acquaintance with Florence that are recent enough to be relevant. _

_ Nineteen? When she disappeared. God, that’s… awful. _

_ No, I don’t think it does. If anything, it makes it worse. Look, I of all people know what it’s like to be bombarded with this every day. I have to believe that it’s worth keeping it in some normal sort of perspective. I’ve seen what happens to people who don’t. _

_ I honestly don’t know if she would have recognized you. Just because she’s lucid doesn’t mean she’s still who she used to be. But I wouldn’t rule it out. I’ve met a few who found their humanity important enough to remember. _

_ Hmph. You’re not human either, you know. _


End file.
